Monday, October 8, 2012

#Evernote as an E-Portfolio #EdChat

One of the things I'm doing with Evernote this year is having students use it as a way to store all of their work in class. I am slowly rolling it out this year because I'm asking my students to learn many different tools and I do not want to overwhelm them.

I chose my Freshmen to try the full E-Portfolio idea because I only have one class of them and it is a small class. Here is what I set up:

I had each student create their Evernote Account.
I had each student create a notebook and name it with their name followed by E-Portfolio. (ex. Nicholas Provenzano E-Portfolio)
In class, I had the students share the folder with me and give me editing rights.

By following these steps, I have access to all of their work stored in their e-portfolio. Every assignment they do is now accessible when I want to look at it. This has been great for checking in work.

The other day, I sat down and looked through their work and I wanted to leave comments. So, I created a new note and labeled it "Mr P's Comments". In there, I label a date and share my thoughts on their work so far. If I wanted, I could record a voice message for them. When the students see this, I am going to encourage them to leave their comments below mine and we can start a private dialogue on their work. I can do this from any device connected to the Internet. Awesome!

I'm really excited to see where this can take me. I had student take pictures of their in class essays and save them to their e-portfolios. It blew there mind when I showed them their essays were now searchable in Evernote! It was pretty cool.

8 comments:

This sounds really great. I'm an English teacher who has done something similar with Google Docs (now Drive). Students have created a folder and then shared it with me.

Evernote, of course, is more flexible than Google Drive when it comes to saving various types files (especially recordings).

Questions: What kinds of things will students be putting into their Evernote E-Portfolio? And what are the other tools that you're using with students (that you don't want to overwhelm them too early on)?

I use a wiki for this purpose. I create a secured "project" space for each student and they can upload all sorts of documents and files to their space. As the wiki organizer I have "editing" rights. We don't have apple hardware at our school, so this is our best option.

I've been wanting to do this with our 5th graders but I don't want them to have the ability to share anything. We are working hard to teach them responsibility but these kids seem to be pretty excited to find ways to mess with things ;) Sounds like me when I was a kid!

That's a good point about the editing capabilities, but I'm more concerned about kids writing notes and then "sharing" that note or if they per chance come across images and things like that…For the age requirement I would most likely create a classroom account they could use to share with their teachers. Evernote has a write up on how a school is treated as the customer, therefore making them responsible for managing the use of the application.

@Mark - I'm having students put the graded copies of essays and other work in their e-portfolio to reference at a later date. For my Freshmen, they are filling their e-portfolio with all of their writing work and corrected work. As for other tools, they use Turnitin.com and Blogger for different assignments and using Evernote on its own can be tough if you are new to the system. They also have no passwords for the school system, so I try to take it easy on them.

@Trevor - At the moment you cannot control what they share on their account, but you could create the folders you want them to use and share it with them so you would control all of the sharing and editing rights. That is more work for you, but it could be done that way. I encourage my students to share their notes with others. It's good teach the collaboration because, as adults, we will want people to share info with us if we miss it.

@Unknown - My students and I have premium accounts that allow us to share and edit shared notebooks.